3. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They
teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored
inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what
we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with
shame our own opinion from another.

4. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must
take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide
universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but
through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to
till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he
knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

5. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression
on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without
preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that
it might testify of that particular ray.

6. We but half express ourselves, and we are ashamed of that divine idea
which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and
of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his
work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put
his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done
otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not
deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no
invention, no hope.